The Mulderbosch Rosé is made from Cabernet Sauvignon. Because it’s made from a hefty grape, so to speak, it’s a fairly hefty rosé, and would handle food nicely. In fact, the back of the bottle recommends crab cakes, chicken satay, spring rolls with ginger, herb rubbed turkey, ratatouille, and fruit-glazed pork chops.

The nose was lovely, filled with roses, strawberries, and cherries.

I found it started out a little like drinking a Sweet Tart candy. Now, I love Sweet Tarts, but I’m surprised when I find them in my wine. There was also a lot of tart cherry and pomegranate. As the wine warmed up a little, I noticed a slightly herbal finish, gradually supplanting all that tartness.

I try really hard to keep my personal politics out of this blog. You all don’t care (I hope) whether I’m Democratic or Republican or for whom I voted. But Issue 9 has a ripple effect across our city and our region, with consequences pretty far into the future.

Kevin and I live in Northern Ky, and we’re pretty lucky in that the bus swings right by the house and drops off Kevin pretty close to his office downtown. I contemplated a job in Mason for while, but the drive turned me off. I certainly can’t take a bus from Northern Kentucky to Mason without a whole lot of hassle, and having lived in the DC area, I no longer have the patience for traffic.

When I lived near DC, I often worked projects in Princeton, NJ, and Philadelphia. To get there, I took a train (or multiple trains in some cases). Everything worked so well together: Amtrak, the New Jersey Transit, the DC Metro, and the Baltimore Light Rail. I could easily and comfortably get anywhere I needed to go, without worrying about weather or traffic. Everything connected. It was particularly wonderful when I wanted to go to New York City for an evening from Princeton or to the airport. One time I even took a train from upstate New York back to Baltimore. It’s so relaxing …

The passenger rail in Alaska takes you across the state. We just went halfway.

In Chicago, I usually take the Blue Line from the airport to Downtown. It’s so easy, and whereas a cab runs around $30 or a car includes renting + upwards of $25/day for parking, CTA costs me $3. The Blue Line also runs from downtown to a neighborhood I love with a great shoe store. And that’s just the Blue Line. Chicago’s public transportation is fantastic, running above, below, and around the city – making it a vibrant city, full of people from the surrounding suburbs who can easily get downtown to museums and shopping and work.

Imagine how great it would be to take a train/light rail to the airport, or to the outer suburbs, or downtown without having to deal with parking?

Those for Issue 9 play up the Streetcar, but that’s not the only thing Issue 9 covers. Basically, if you vote yes for 9, you’re saying you don’t ever want passenger rail connecting our fair city to Columbus and Cleveland. The 3C line would be dead to us. Heck, the fun train at the Zoo (within Hamilton County limits) would even be a problem. Yep, this measure affects the Zoo train too.

I can’t vote on this. I really wish I could. And in the interest of keeping this brief, I’ll direct you to Wine Me, Dine Me and the Hoperatives. Both of those blogs have written wonderfully informed posts about how voting yes for 9 will slow down development in Cincinnati. I’m just telling you how much I love trains. Vote No on 9.

This is the one of several recurring posts from David Lazarus about the intricacies of opening and running a wine shop. David’s posts will appear on Wednesdays.

We finally got the store open to the public and made our first sale. It should be great and we should be able to relax and just sell wine, right? Not so fast! There were a few glitches upon opening.

We opened our door with a fancy point-of-sale (POS) computerized register that turned out to be non-operational. That means no inventory control, no fancy receipts, no tracking customer sales history. This made life harder since much of the wine sold in the first several weeks was not tracked and I only noticed sales after several bottles of a wine had been sold. Although this was a major headache and somewhat embarrassing, it was not the only glitch at opening.

We had been so busy just getting the store set up that we hadn’t remembered simple things like bags for our customers to carry the wine home. We also had not done anything about wine accessories. It took about a week after opening for me to find a source for the bags, and then another week or so before I got the wine accessories ordered. But the store was finally beginning to reflect what I’d envisioned.

What more could we have to worry about? Now we can sit back and sell wine! Well, now that we have our working POS system, we still have to proof the nearly seven hundred listings to correct any mistakes in the transfer of data and put in pricing where it was left out. We also have a weekly task of selecting the theme of the Friday wine tasting, the complementary food, and then getting the whole thing in place on Friday. It is a lot of work and yes, some of the tasks will remain as part of our weekly list of tasks, but eventually it will become easier as it becomes part of our routine.

Glitches aside, I have been pleasantly surprised with the response of the neighborhood surrounding our store. We have made sales every day we have been open and better than half of those have been to new customers. We have even had new repeat customers. All of this in just three weeks! Are we making money yet? Certainly not, but we do have decent cash flow for a brand-new business. Under the circumstances (economy and new business), we are doing better than anyone would have expected.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of those who have patronized our new venture and encourage those who love interesting wines to come and check us out.